How times have changed. Interesting article about drug use in Finland in the 20th Century,

Finland - a leading consumer of heroin from the 1930s to the 1950s

By Tommi Nieminen

In 1936 Finland, the small republic led by President P.E. Svinhufvud, ranked first in a significant global statistic, higher even than Japan.
In the two decades that followed, more heroin was used per capita in Finland than anywhere else in the world.
In Northern Europe we were really the odd men out. Finnish heroin consumption was many times higher than that of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland - and just to put that into perspective, we are talking the combined figure of those four countries.
Heroin was in the medicine cabinets of ordinary citizens all the way until the early 1950s - for instance, in the popular cough medicine Pulmo.

It is no wonder that grandmother or grandfather never said anything about this. Heroin was a good medicine.
“The wave of cocaine in Finland in the 1930s, and the amount of heroin consumption in the 1930s, was fairly new and surprising information for myself as well”, said historian Mikko Ylikangas at his office at the Academy of Finland in Sörnäinen.
The 46-year-old Dr. Ylikangas is the programme director at the academy’s Intoxicants and Addiction research programme. On Wednesday, a book of his will be published. It is the first overall review of the use of hard drugs in Finland from the 19th century to the 1950s.

For the book, Ylikangas dug through hospitals’ patient archives, as well as war archives, and the archives of various police units.
What he found was a Finland of our grandparents - the Finland of the Civil War and Second World War generations - in which consumption of substances such as opium, morphine, and heroin was commonplace.
There was recreational use of drugs as well, but very little. Pharmaceutical drugs were used, because times were hard. There was tuberculosis, insomnia, anxiety, and war.
It could be said that Finland was drugged onto the world map.

There was much heroin, but it was a prescription drug. Ylikangas mentions three rational reasons why so much more heroin was used in Finland than in the rest of Europe.
“Heroin was a good medicine for respiratory ailments - and Finland had plenty of them, in connection with a tuberculosis epidemic. Second, it was cheaper than other similar medicines, and third, the social problems linked with abuse of medicines had not got out of control in Finland.”
Heroin was a super-drug of the time of shortages.
Medicines containing heroin were taken by both young and old alike. There were cheap heroin pills, and Pulmona, a cough medicine containing heroin, was consumed heavily, because tuberculosis was a health problem well into the 1950s.
“Getting heroin was childishly simple”, Ylikangas says. “Its use could have got wildly out of hand, although there are fairly short traditions of abuse in Finland. In addition, the substance was contained in various types of mixtures, which were more difficult to abuse.”

The rest of the world looked at Finland with amazement in the 1930s.
The League of Nations, the predecessor of the UN, urged member states to give up heroin, but the Finland of Svinhufvud refused to do so.
According to medical authorities and the Finnish Medical Association, heroin was a cheap medicine, and no reasons were seen to place restrictions on it.
It could not be replaced by other substances.
Therefore, both domestically-produced heroin and imported versions were used.
Local pharmaceuticals firm Orion’s heroin tablets contained five myelograms of heroin. There was also Adapyrine from Sweden, Diffines from Germany, and Hemyphone from Switzerland.

While the rest of the world started to ban hard drugs, Finland repeatedly went against the trend.
After Finland joined the International Opium Treaty in 1936, wholesalers started hoarding goods intensely. Pharmacies filled their storerooms. The Ministry of Defence immediately ordered 1.5 kg. of heroin for its military pharmacies, and 5 kg. of cocaine.
Nevertheless, abuse of heroin and cocaine remained minimal; from the 19th century through the 1950s, the number one drug of Finnish addicts was morphine.

“There are long traditions in the abuse of morphine in Finland, and many were already hooked”, Ylikangas says.
It was only during the war that the use of heroin went ballistic.
But let’s not go to the front lines just yet.

The writing of history is naturally always selective, and always more or less ideologically-based.
Schoolchildren are always told how Hannes Kolehmainen, Paavo Nurmi, Ville Ritola, and other athletes "ran Finland onto the world map" in the 1920s and at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, before the country was even an independent entity.
What has been bypassed is the extent to which the world’s first wave of cocaine-linked crime hit Finland in the 1920s.
In the aftermath of the World War and the Russian Revolution, all kinds of emigrants were operating in Helsinki: Russian nobles and military officers who had lost their money and their power, spies, and smugglers.
The economy was in terrible shape. There was no social security, so people had to find ways of making money.
Some started dealing drugs.

German pharmaceutical companies were on the verge of bankruptcy after the First World War.
To get out of the economic crisis, they sold large amounts of cocaine and morphine to shady characters, who smuggled the goods to St. Petersburg, via Helsinki. There was demand, because there were huge numbers of addicts in the postwar Russia of V.I. Lenin.
“Domestic demand could be satisfied largely by buying it from pharmacies. Then people bought it directly from German ships in the harbour”, Ylikangas says.
Some of the drugs transported on the Germany-St. Petersburg route stayed in Helsinki. Cocaine was available at prohibition era speakeasies, and under the table at restaurants.
“The activities were largely run by doormen. The product that was sold was powdered cocaine”, Ylikangas says.

The drug business was no small matter even compared with today.
In 1925, four kilos of cocaine were found in three police raids in Helsinki.
This is as much as Finnish police and customs authorities seized in 1995-1999.

In Helsinki, small-time drug barons were arrested, such as businessman Tahvo Käppi and a doctor, Kaarlo Kalske, both from Vyborg. They sold drugs by the kilo to Estonia.
Doctors wrote prescriptions for the upper class and cultural figures; before the Winter and Continuation wars, addicts were mainly doctors, nurses, businessmen, artists, lawyers, teachers, and officers.

It was the age of Finnish alcohol prohibition.
Cocaine, for instance, had not been banned.
According to a police report from 1928, drug addition looked like an upper class matter.
Present at a cocaine orgy at the home of Colonel Wennerholm were “the colonel himself, J. Kauppinen, young cadets, and girls. The girls were fed cocaine in oranges and sweets. The base of the thumb was used as a cocaine pit, where cocaine was deposited to be sucked.”
Colonel Wennerholm would actually have been a perfect character for an American crime movie of the 1950s.

Hitler invaded Poland in the autumn of 1939. Josef Stalin's Soviet Union occupied the Baltic States.
Finland responded to the perceived threat of a major war. It began to stockpile hard drugs with vigour.
The Defence Forces signed a contract with the pharmaceutical company Orion, which committed itself to keeping an amount of raw opium in its stockpiles that was equivalent to 150 kilos of pure morphine.
Cocaine, heroin, and morphine were ordered by pharmacies. The medical section of the Defence Staff ordered 50 kilos of morphine and 35 kilos of heroin - enough to produce seven million 5-mg. heroin pills.

The medical officers were still not satisfied: there was not enough of the hard stuff around.
Never mind, for relief was coming.
During the Winter War a ridiculous amount of drugs came to Finland. By the end of 1940, 1,511 kg. of opium alone was delivered to the military pharmacy in Helsinki.
It was supplied mainly by the American Red Cross and the Swedish state. In December 1940 there were 117,000 heroin pills, 469,000 morphine pills, 917 kg. of opium and 351 kg. of morphine.
There was certainly plenty of stuff for the Continuation War, which broke out in the following year.

“It was an interesting time with respect to the substances”, recalls Erik E. Anttinen, Professor Emeritus of social psychiatry.
Anttinen fought during the Winter War, the Continuation War, and the War of Lapland - first in the artillery and - after going to flight school - in the Finnish Air Force.
“Substances qualifying as hard drugs were handed out surprisingly freely, in my opinion. If someone had a cough, he might get dozens of heroin tablets, because it was an efficient cough suppressant”, Anttinen recalls.

Heroin was a wartime panacea, which was used for pain, cough, arthritis, and muscle aches.
Medics carried two ampules of cocaine in their bags, in addition to four ampules of morphine, 30 opium tablets, and 30 heroin tablets. Those on the front line were issued a package of five heroin pills.
Anttinen took heroin “a few times”. He recalls taking Pervitin (a methamphetamine produced by a Berlin pharmaceutical company) only once, in the summer of 1944, when he flew several combat missions a day in the Karelian Isthmus.
Whoa! Methamphetamine in a plane?
“They did tell me that I shouldn’t take too much for a longer period of time”, Anttinen says. “I don’t recall that there would ever have been any plane accidents caused by taking too much Pervitin."

On the front line, strong medicine is needed, especially for the wounded and for commandos.
All the same, Ylikangas was dumbstruck by the amounts of heroin that were consumed by the Finnish military.
During the Continuation War, 7-9 million Antineralgin heroin pills were consumed annually.
“To my knowledge, no country involved in a war had distributed heroin in such large amounts. The use of Pervitin was somewhat more selective”, Ylikangas says.

The German army had sharply curtailed its use of Pervitin already in 1941 because the substance had led to unexpected problems.
Soldiers experienced hallucinations. Some could not sleep, even though “it had been tested with German precision on both animals and people”, Ylikangas says.
Germany unloaded some of its Pervitin stocks in Finland. According to a secret letter of the medical department of the Defence Staff in August 1941, 850,000 Pervitin tablets were stockpiled by the Finnish Defence Forces.
In emergency situations, especially during the big Soviet offensive of 1944, they were used heavily - even by ordinary foot soldiers.

The Continuation War actually quite equalised the use of drugs.
On the front lines, small farmers and factory workers tried drugs that had previously been available only in Helsinki high society. Some got hooked.
After the war, special forces soldiers told about their experiences in the press and in books. One of them recalled an escape that took weeks while under the influence of amphetamines.
Another said that he had seen large buildings, dancing girls, and chandelliers on the front. One dispatch officer mistook snow-covered boulders for sheep.

After the war, in 1946, Helsinki was a restless capital, with plenty of shady people and crime brought on by the war.
There were nearly 15,000 break-ins during one year. There were divorces, violence, and a stumbling economy. Broken soldiers were institutionalised.
Heroin, amphetamines, and morphine had flowed from the front lines onto the street market, and military pharmacies were bulging with the stuff.
Heroin was used and sold in several cafes and restaurants in the cities. Groups of morphine users lurked in the park of Helsinki’s Old Church, outside the Church of St. Paul, and at the Hietaniemi cemetery.

Erik E. Anttinen, who had experienced three wars, studied to be a doctor.
In the summer of 1950 he was recruited to work at the Lapinlahti mental hospital in Helsinki.
“There were addicts from around the country, because it was a clinic of the Medical School of the University of Helsinki. There were especially many abusers of opiates”, Anttinen recalls.
“We tried to give them medicines that might be less addictive. We tried to listen to them and talk to them in order to ease the anxiety phase. Those people would sweat, and be in terrible pain.”

There were differing views on how many of the addicts had been wounded while on the front.
Erkki Jokivartio estimated that at least 60 per cent of the heroin addicts had been wounded. Doctors Achilles Westling and Jaakko Riippa studied the cases of 108 addicts after the war. Of them the dependency of only 14 was caused by treatment that they received for injuries in action.
In police questioning in the early 1950s, the addicts themselves estimated their numbers at about 1,000.
That was two generations ago.
Much less heroin is being used now, but the abuse of other drugs is much more common. In 2005 an estimated 14,000-19,000 people were believed to be hooked on hard drugs. About half of them lived in Helsinki. Three out of four were hooked on amphetamines.

As far away as UN headquarters in New York, people wondered how it was possible that Finland - a country of four million inhabitants - could consume as much heroin in one year in the late 1940s as other countries use on average in a quarter of a century.
In 1946, for instance, 99 kg. of prescription heroin was consumed in Finland.
Finland was not yet a member state of the UN.
Perhaps that is why the response that New York got from Helsinki was somewhat cool.
The message from Helsinki was Finland intended to continue using heroin, and in fact, it would need more than before - for reasons of public health.
What defiance! After all, this was a country which in subsequent decades has always crawled in front of whatever centre of power that happened to be issuing orders.

“That would probably not happen in Finland under the EU. Now directives are immediately implemented”, Ylikangas says.
Under Paasikivi, Finland finally gave in.
Finland wanted to join the UN. When heroin disappeared from the pharmacies in the early 1950s and the availability of morphine came under stricter control, addicts in Helsinki were in a panic.
Some would break into pharmacies. Others would tour rural pharmacies, which would sell hard stuff to those saying that they were war invalids.

Many doctors were also users.
Dr. Ailo Huhtala said in 1955 that about one per cent of Finnish doctors were drug addicts. According to statistics of the Finnish Medical Association, there were 2,381 doctors in Finland. This means that if Huhtala’s estimate was anywhere near the truth, there were 20-30 drug-addicted doctors in Finland.
“Among doctors there was always a tendency to try to deal with problems quietly among themselves”, Ylikangas says. “They were not hauled into police interrogations. At that time, those in high society were treated at home, or they were sent abroad for treatment.”
Ilkka Taipale, doctor and veteran political activist, believes that some of the addicted doctors had been hooked on heroin already during the war.
“One of the doctors who had been in drug rehab later became the director of the Hesperia Hospital.”

Heroin disappeared in the 1950s.
Drug addicts switched to Algidon, a prescription medicine similar to morphine.
“At first it was thought that it would not be addictive, but it was”, Anttinen says.
Algidon is actually a very powerful drug. People would die from abusing it. There were at least eleven sure cases. Some of the addicts of the time might still be alive.
“I know of at least one Algidon addict of the 1950s who is still alive”, Ilkka Taipale says.
He passes on an interview request, but there is no answer.
This is a pity. The request is still open.

Glad you liked it. I love stories about antiquated drug scenes like Diary of a Drug Fiend. This is a sharp contrast to the situation in the country now. Acording the the US State Dept report on international narcotics control strategy for Finland.

http://www.state.gov/p/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2009/vol1/116521.htm

The overall incidence of drug use in Finland remains low (relative to many other western countries); however, drug use has increased over the past decade. Cocaine is rare, but marijuana, khat, amphetamines, methamphetamine, synthetic club drugs, Ecstasy, LSD and heroin and heroin-substitutes can be found, although heroin is very rare and extremely difficult to find in HelsinkI. . Finland has historically had one of Europe's lowest cannabis-use rates. Cannabis seizures have been mixed since 2003, with total numbers of seizures in several areas increasing, yet with total quantities of cannabis seized having decreased. Ecstasy, GHB, Ketamine (“Vitamin K”) and other MDMA-Ecstasy-type drugs are concentrated among young people and associated with the club culture in Helsinki and other large cities.
.........
Abuse of Subutex (buprenorphine-used in treating addiction) and other heroin-substitutes seems to have replaced heroin abuse to a significant extent. Finnish officials note that Finland is one of few countries reporting that people become addicted from Subutex use. Possession of Subutex is legal in Finland with a doctor's prescription, but Finnish physicians do not readily write prescriptions for Subutex unless patients are actually in a supervised withdrawal program. Finnish couriers do obtain Subutex from other EU countries, however. A major change occurred at the end of 2007 when the Baltic countries joined the Schengen area. This means that a person who resides principally in Finland is no longer allowed to import Subutex prescribed elsewhere. Finnish officials have not seen a significant move to heroin now that Subutex is not as readily available from the Baltic countries. The volume of Subutex seizures by Finnish customs has remained consistent over the last five years

A far cry from its former glory. Now they have to settle for Bupe. According to the State Dept, heroin hard to get in Helsinki today, unlike the scene 1946 with morphine and other opiates:

After the war, in 1946, Helsinki was a restless capital, with plenty of shady people and crime brought on by the war.
There were nearly 15,000 break-ins during one year. There were divorces, violence, and a stumbling economy. Broken soldiers were institutionalised.
Heroin, amphetamines, and morphine had flowed from the front lines onto the street market, and military pharmacies were bulging with the stuff.
Heroin was used and sold in several cafes and restaurants in the cities. Groups of morphine users lurked in the park of Helsinki’s Old Church, outside the Church of St. Paul, and at the Hietaniemi cemetery.

Finland's constitution places a strong emphasis on the protection of civil liberties and this sometimes adversely impacts law enforcement's ability to investigate and prosecute drug-related crime. The use of electronic surveillance, such as wiretapping, under the Finnish Coercive Measures Act is generally permitted in serious narcotics investigations. Finnish political culture tends to favor the allocation of resources to demand reduction and rehabilitation efforts over strategies aimed at reducing supply.

It is somewhat disconcerting, but certainly not surprising, that the state department seems annoyed by these aspects of the Finnish system

jspun

07-10-2009, 05:23

The wave of cocaine in Finland in the 1930s, and the amount of heroin consumption in the 1930s, was fairly new and surprising information for myself as well”, said historian Mikko Ylikangas at his office at the Academy of Finland in Sörnäinen.

I'm no historian but I was suprised that in another EU nation with contemporary illegal drug use on the low side, Greece, had a thriving drug scene in the 1920s. This was the result of the absorption of ethnic Greek refugees fleeing Turkey due to post WWI hostilities. This sparked a thriving art and music scene that led to the establishent of rebetiko music which is kind of a Greek equivalent of the blues that still survives to this day. The refugees from Asia Minor brought hash mostly but opium and suprisingly heroin, and cocaine use was wide spread during this period. WWII and the occupation by nazi Germany brought an end to this era in Greece and effectively killed the creative sector along with the drug scene.:( I document some of this in a previous post in Foreign Drug Scenes in DC.

qwe

09-10-2009, 19:30

interesting how they were so big into morphine and not at all into heroin, given their similar pharmacological effects. i've always thought that everyone vastly underestimates how much our outlook on drugs are influenced by emotions, and not logic. people will only drink a certain type of liquor, a certain brand of cigarette, only use brand name vicodin or oxy, etc. the public attitude towards drugs is so discordant and emotional that they were able to be scapegoated, the public attitude was able to be shaped, to fit the interests of the ruling entities quite nicely

jspun

11-10-2009, 05:35

interesting how they were so big into morphine and not at all into heroin, given their similar pharmacological effects. i've always thought that everyone vastly underestimates how much our outlook on drugs are influenced by emotions, and not logic. people will only drink a certain type of liquor, a certain brand of cigarette, only use brand name vicodin or oxy

I agree strongly with what you state qwe- this is a very astute observation. Outlook of and cultural expectations, mores have a huge influence on how drugs and which drugs are used, demonized, ect... This highlights a very important point that occured to me several months ago and that I have been thinking of starting a thread about but haven't figured out how best to formulated the question and which forum to start it in. With respect to similar pharmacological effects in many places people substituted OC for heroin, some reason may have had to do with a perceived lower danger. But there is something that I found interesting, a sort of phenomena that seems to be a peculiarity to amphetamines.

With amphetamines, on the black market there seems to be preferences for certain analogues or formulations. Take the situation in current amphetamine type stimulants (ATS) markets worldwide. In North America, Oceana, and East Asia, the ATS of choice on the black market is methamphetamine, particularly the dextro isomer( shards, crank, crystal meth, shabu, ice). In South East Asia, particularly in thailand (were it is called yaa baa) and Cambodia (were it is called yaa maa) the shabu crystal form isn't as prevalent. What one finds most often is this drug in pill form compounded with caffeine which is the way it was available in the early 70s when abused by truck and bus drivers. It is available in pill form even though it is most often smoked in which case it would probably need to be crushed if I remember correctly. Plus a P2P type precursor is used to produce it unlike the most common ephedrine/pseudo synthetoc route ( but with some kind of intermediate with a chloro group attached or something if my rusty memory serves.)

Europe is another interesting case in point. most of the ATS available are racemic amphetamine sulphate, either as a powder or gel like substance. The
exception is the Czech Republic and to a lesser extent Slovokia which has a methamphetamine scene that stretches back to the communist era. The street term for this drug, interestingly enough is pervetin, the trade name for the methamphetamine formulation made by a german pharmaceutical firm that was utilized in the blitzkrieg during WWII that long disappeared from the German formulary. There was a thread started in one of the forums on BL that addressed the topic of why is there a preference form amphetamine sulphate in most of Europe when meth would seem to be more reinforcing, fun, ect...Plus, this is even more surprising because the precursor most often used in the production of amphetamine/ recemic meth- P2P- seems to be more difficult or problematic to aquire. The thread left the anwer inconclusive for me. Why is there an island of meth/pervetin use in the former czechleslovakia in a sea of amphetamine sulphate is a mystery. This preference for the ATS or ATS formulation one is accostomed to I call the "Prague Effect" or "Prague Phenomena"- I know this sounds cheezy.8)

Even more surprising is the middle east were captagon abuse is rampant. The active ingridient in captagon is an amphetamine complexed with theophylline. Why would the captagon cooks in places like Bulagaria or Turkey go through the extra effort and pain in the ass to procure the reagents to make this molecule. Why not sell just pure amphetamine sulfate or ephedrine + theophylline in its place to users in Saudi Arabia and other places were it is popular. Just like piperazines are sold in places in place of MDMA. This insistance on familiar product is interesting in the world of ATSs.

Interestin fact with Greek hash scene- while it was being criminalized in Greece in the capital of Athena and in port city of Pireus a new scene emerged for Rebetiko in Thessalonika. It turned out the chief of police, Basilis Mousadakis, or something like this was a huge enthusiasts so he aranged for the musicians to have access a supply of hashish and other drugs. This is from the book Hashish! Wife bugging, can't concentrate- gonna see "black light Orchestra" making her by finishing post. Might have to edit if it doesn't make sense. Edit: name of band Dark Star Orchestra- proves my point about not being able to concentrate with her nagging.

jspun

12-10-2009, 03:09

What do people think about this though? The pain in the ass to make captagon illicitly, the extra effort and expertise it probably takes- why noy just mix theophylline (easily obtained) with any amphetamine . Does this really produce a high better or more marketable than meth. Doesn't make sense from a marketing standpoint but supports qwe's theory that outlook and emotional considerations hugely influence the decisions we make as consumers of drugs. Moreover, there seems to be an additional thing going on , my so called Prague Phenomena, where traditional consumers of a particular ATS insist on a product that is as close to the original formulation, in appearance, the high (in all its subtleties), maybe the taste of the raw product. Maybe this is the motivating factor for illicit cooks going through all the hassel to produce a counterfeit product close to the original form even though it would be easier and still it would seem marketable to sell something else that is close enough. In light of the fact that with other classes of drugs, heroin users will settle for morphine, dilaudid, or oxy. MDMA consumers in many parts of the world will settle for piperazines (although mostly not like it). Even with MDs, I've never heard of anyone saying. "damit, this is MDA (or MDE), not MDMA." The market is kept alive. Wonder why this is. The mandrax (methaqualone) scene that predominates in the Western Cape of South Africa also provides an interesting example of this phenomena. Most Mandrax is smoked in powder form in a "white pipe" which is also a slang term for the drug. However, the drug, though illicitly produced, the drug cooks go through the effort of buying a pill press and pressing the mandrax into pills. It is also mostly compounded with benadryl just like the original form, although there might be a sensible reason for this- diphenhydramine increases the bioavailability of methaqualone.

My so called "Prague Phenomena"would make an interesting avenue for research imho.

Tchort

18-10-2009, 16:34

Great find. 19th and early 20th century drug culture anthropology is fascinating.

For anyone wondering, Algidon, the prescription drug reffered to in the article as the next drug of choice for Heroin addicts in the 1950's, is or was a brand name of Methadone.

jspun

19-11-2010, 12:22

For posterity

Budisti

19-11-2010, 13:19

Yea we had lotsa war veterans who were addicted, and they can get to this day morphine from the goverment.
Nowadays the heroin scene has changed into use of Subutex and other pharmasutical opiates here in Finland, So its still here just not as strong.
PS. afaik heroin was legal longer then weed and poppy seeds are to this day legal.
PPS.
Finland's constitution places a strong emphasis on the protection of civil liberties and this sometimes adversely impacts law enforcement's ability to investigate and prosecute drug-related crime. The use of electronic surveillance, such as wiretapping, under the Finnish Coercive Measures Act is generally permitted in serious narcotics investigations.
The goverment whipes theyre arse with our constitution so it doesnt matter what it says, and the use of electronic surveillance is allowed if you are suspected of a finable crime (i.e. pissing on the street), and they dont even need a house warrent to search your apartment... This is Finland

mimac

19-11-2010, 13:27

@Tchort, do you know of any good books/papers on that topic?

mymindisgoo

19-11-2010, 19:39

that was a fun read, lots of dope fer sure. like they said, it's amazing how they consumed so many opiates in a short period of time compared to what other countries report as their quarter century usage

jspun

19-11-2010, 21:31

=budesti
The goverment whipes theyre arse with our constitution so it doesnt matter what it says, and the use of electronic surveillance is allowed if you are suspected of a finable crime (i.e. pissing on the street), and they dont even need a house warrent to search your apartment...

Join the club... what is the modern day drug scene in Finland like- what are the major recreational drugs used/abused? Is it in line with the forementioned US state department report? Do speed, GHB, Extacy predominate. Is the use of cannabis very low in your experience?"

polymath

19-11-2010, 23:02

I live in Finland too, and as far as I know, the trends in drug use here are very much the same as elsewhere in the world... except for the fact that cocaine and crack are very rare here. Cannabis is the most common illegal drug in Finland. Talking about the opiates, we still have an OTC cough syrup that contains 150mg codeine per bottle.